Chip startup Pliops Ltd. said on Thursday it has closed a $65 million funding round backed by Intel Corp, Nvidia Corp and others to support its mission to improve storage efficiency in data centers.
It is understood that Pliops provides a special-purpose processor that enables applications to access data held in flash memory 100 times faster than traditional methods. Additionally, the startup claims that the processor uses only a fraction of the power required by traditional hardware to boost speed.
In addition to Intel and Nvidia, the startup’s value proposition has attracted the attention of numerous other investors, including chip maker Xilinx Inc., storage driver provider Western Digital Corp., Viola Ventures, SOMV, SoftBank Ventures Asia, Expon Capital and Sweetwood Capital also participated in the new $65 million round, with Koch Disruptive Technologies also leading the investment.
With the investment, the chip company reportedly hopes to take the company’s memory processor promises to new levels of scale, speed and cost-effectiveness. Deployed in PCIe card form or as a cloud service, storage processors have hardware capabilities that unlock the full potential of SSD storage by exponentially increasing cost, performance, and durability. Through its storage processors, Pliops dramatically speeds up the processing of data-intensive applications in data centers.
The challenge the company aims to solve, Pliops said, is that as data companies process more, so does the computing power required to move data in and out of flash memory. Information must be compressed to save capacity before being written to storage, and then decompressed when read. There are many other low-level computations involved in the task.
All these operations not only consume processing power, but also generate other data. According to Pliops, for every byte written or read, the storage infrastructure must process multiple bytes. The result is substantial hardware overhead that will only increase as businesses continue to adopt data-heavy applications such as machine learning and analytics tools.
Pliops’ processors take over critical storage-related tasks in company servers to speed up workflows. This launcher provides the processor as part of an accelerator card that plugs into the server via a PCIe port. And, Pliops said, organizations don’t have to rewrite existing applications for speed.
“As data storage and the computational demands to process it grow exponentially, current approaches are no longer sufficient,” said Uri Beitler, CEO of Pliops. “Our solution takes a new approach. , enabling unprecedented scalability in the data center. Plus, having a partner as important as Nvidia to increase their investment in Pliops is a tremendous amount of trust.”
“Pliops is effectively reinventing this approach to address one of the most critical data-intensive challenges in a large and expanding market,” said Eli Groner, Managing Director of KDT. “Pliops technology is not only widely used in today’s workloads , but also for future emerging workloads.”
In its mission to revolutionize the way data and storage are managed in data centers, the company plans to expand its technology into new use cases, expand its product line, and double the size of the company by the end of 2021. its global executive team and is increasing its resources as it moves into the next phase: providing broad availability of its storage processors and adding value to its impressive list of existing customers.
It is crucial for Pliops to benefit more customers by delivering its solutions in multiple formats. Whether on-premises, in the cloud, integrated with customer products, or built into ASICs, Pliops engages with cloud service providers and leaders in the broader enterprise market segment seeking to accelerate a variety of data-intensive workloads.
“Pliops technology accelerates the fastest-growing workloads, driving the need for higher compute and storage performance in the data center,” noted Nimrod Gindi, senior vice president of investments at NVIDIA. “Pliops’ data center GPU and DPU product lines are integrated with Pliops’ The storage processors combine to deliver accelerated cloud and machine learning solutions that will deliver exceptional performance and efficiency to our customers. “
Despite years of research on fundamental issues such as efficient data structures and dynamic capacity management, Pliops’ novel approach to combining hardware and software has inspired leaders in data storage and processing to invest in the company. Likewise, many of the largest cloud data center providers and users, as well as leading storage innovators such as Percona, SAKURA Internet and Intel, are openly recognizing the potential impact of Pliops innovations – and are collaborating as customers and partners.
Uri Beitler, founder and CEO of Pliops noted: “KDT is committed to investing heavily in disruptive technologies with huge market potential – which fits perfectly with what we’re doing at Pliops.” Compute demands are growing exponentially, and the status quo approach becomes insufficient. Our solution employs a new approach that enables unprecedented scalability in the data center. Additionally, having a partner as important as NVIDIA to increase They have great confidence in their investment in Pliops. We are committed to maximizing our technology’s potential and look forward to building long-term strategic partnerships with our investors and customers.”
In addition to server-attached PCIe accelerators, Pliops enables customers to deploy their processors as a cloud service. The startup announced that it is reaching out to cloud service providers and leaders in the broader enterprise market segment. In addition, Pliops said, customers can integrate their processors into larger chips, such as application-specific integrated circuits, or into their own data center products.
According to the data, Pliops, founded in 2017, is a technology innovator dedicated to making data centers run faster and more efficiently. The Pliops storage platform is a fundamental building block in the data-centric era, and can handle the exponential growth in data storage, and the subsequent computational processing requirements that arise from it. Pliops uses patented, innovative data structures and algorithms to eliminate data amplification and achieve consistent I/O performance, capacity and endurance – up to 100x faster data access with only a fraction of the computational load and power consumption. Recently, Pliops was named one of the top 10 hottest semiconductor startups of 2020 by CRN and its storage processors are shipping to select customers. To date, the company has raised $115 million from leading global investors including State of Mind Ventures, Viola Ventures, Intel Capital, KDT, SoftBank Ventures Asia, NVIDIA, Expon Capital, Western Digital, Xilinx and Sweetwood Capital.
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